by Sandy Brown
Every resident of Lucca knows the sculpture-encrusted, white-and-black façade of Chiesa San Michele in Foro, but I’ve often strolled straight through its surrounding piazza without stopping to study its monuments and plaques. The “Foro” part of its name points to its prior life as center of Roman Lucca, and nothing remains of the ancient cardo and temples and markets that once stood there. But hidden in plain sight, among the cafes and bank office facades, stand quiet witnesses to the last six centuries of belief, civic ambition, artistic brilliance, and national trauma—each one chiseled in stone or cast in brass.
The Burlamacchi Statue – Often seen, but seldom understood
Standing at the center of the piazza is the imposing marble figure of Francesco Burlamacchi, patrician, merchant, and perhaps the most daring political visionary Lucca ever produced. Sculpted in neoclassical style, Burlamacchi stands with one hand resting on a sword, his expression solemn and unyielding. The pedestal inscription praises “il generoso pensiero di vindicare in libero stato e ordinare a reggimento comune Toscana, Umbria, Romagna”—his bold plan to unite Tuscany, Umbria, and Romagna into a free republic. Arrested by imperial forces, Burlamacchi was executed in Milan on 14 February 1548, martyr to a dream of Italian self-rule that would not be realized for three more centuries. In 1865, with unification freshly achieved, the “Toscana libera” decreed a public monument to him, honoring Burlamacchi as a precursor of the Risorgimento. Today his statue presides over the square not as a conqueror, but as a tragic father of the Italian nation: a reminder that the struggle for liberty in Italy began long before Italy itself existed. As in hagiographic symbolism, he stands with a representation of the instrument of his execution. We was beheaded by sword at 50 years of age, but his memory lived on among proponents of Italian unification, who saw in him a precursor of their work.
To me it is the voids in sculpture, the spaces of the marble block that are removed, which are most impressive. Here, unlike in many statues, the immense robe is open, and the sculptor has carved out an enormous and dark void, big enough to hide a family of raccoons.
Faith on the Wall
On an unassuming side wall adjacent to Bar San Michele is a small marble tablet once meant for hurried pedestrians:
Indulgenza di 40 giorni a chi reciterà un Ave Maria … concessa da Monsig. Cherubino Scalini, Vicario Apostolico, pregando secondo la sua intenzione.
Monsignor Cherubino Scalini was a Lucchese cleric active in the mid-18th century, serving as Apostolic Vicar (effectively the bishop’s representative with spiritual authority) in the 1750s–1760s. Such plaques were once commonplace in Italy: a “street-level” spirituality in which the Church placed the promise of indulgence—remission of penance—into the daily lives of ordinary citizens. Today it is a relic of popular devotion in a city not so deeply Catholic as it once was.
Liberty Style Ornament—with Explorers Looking Down
The striking marble doorway nearby, flanked by full-bodied putti and crowned with colored glass, is a charming product of the late 19th-century Neo-Renaissance revival. Architecturally it imitates Renaissance classicism, but its ornamental program is unmistakably modern Italian patriotism: the small round bronze medallions depict Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci.
Why here? Because in the decades after Italian unification (1861), cities across Italy adopted newly national heroes—especially explorers—as civil “saints” of modern identity. Columbus and Vespucci, both born in what is now Italy (Genoa and Florence), symbolized boldness, scientific progress, and a distinctly global Italian legacy. Their faces on this façade tell us the building was designed during a moment when Lucca, like Florence and Rome, used architectural ornament to participate in the myth-building of the new Italian state.
A House for the Wounded
On the piazza’s southern side, a stark modern inscription testifies to a different Italy:
L’Associazione Nazionale Mutilati e Invalidi di Guerra eresse questa Casa del Mutilato a servizio e memoria del sacrificio dei combattenti per l’unità e la libertà d’Italia. 1932 – 2008.
The A.N.M.I.G. (National Association of War-Disabled Veterans) erected this Casa del Mutilato in 1932—one of many civic structures Mussolini’s government built to honor First World War veterans. Its rededication in 2008 turned the building into a memorial of both suffering and civic care. The stones remember not only victory but the human cost of Italy’s 20th century wars.
Far above eye level and just below the eaves, a large inscription bears the name “Gaetano Montauti,” honoring the Lucchese veteran who championed the rights and welfare of soldiers mutilated in the First World War.
Civitàli and Civic Virtue in the Loggia
Beneath the cover of the loggia stands a bronze statue every Lucchese artisan should know: Matteo Civitali (1436–1501), Lucca’s greatest Renaissance sculptor. He is not represented as a distant genius but as a working craftsman, hands relaxed, mallet ready. His simple plinth reads:
A Matteo Civitali. MDCCCXCIII.
And yes—the radiant Madonna and Child clinging to the SW corner of Chiesa San Michele is his work. Civitali carved it in the late 1480s: the Virgin crowned, encircled by rays, presiding over the piazza. The inscription beneath—UT VIVAM VERA VITA (“That I may live the true life”)—is classical Latin humanism expressed in devotional art. Even gilded today, the sculpture is fundamentally Civitali’s vision: austere, symmetrical, tender. Civitali’s statue under the arcade gazes at the sculpture as though he had just finished and was resting from his work.
Also in the loggia, nineteenth-century Lucca honors two other sons of the city, both remembered in busts by Lucchese sculptor Arnaldo Fazzi (1850-1918):
- Carlo Piaggia (1827–1882), “intrepido esploratore delle terre africane,” a self-taught explorer who lived among Nilotic peoples and sent ethnographic notes back to Italy.
- Vincenzo Consani (1818–1887), a sculptor whose patriotic monuments populate Florence, Livorno, Milan, and Rome. This bust overlooks his bronze of Matteo Civitali and is near his marble sculpture of Francesco Burlamacchi in the center of the piazza.
Both memorials were erected when sculptors and explorers were celebrated as architects of national prestige.
The most dramatic memorial honors Tito Strochi (1845–1867), a Lucchese who died fighting for Garibaldi during the wars of Italian unification. Two allegorical warriors flank his portrait—one wounded, one defiant:
col piè sanguinante proseguì l’impresa … e morì per la patria.
Strochi’s death at 22 became part of the romantic patriotic mythos of the young Italian nation. Here art, politics, and grief converge in stone. Some believe Arnaldo Fazzi is also the artist.
On the adjacent wall a fading 14th or early 15th century fresco of the Madonna and Child survives, its pigment nearly gone and its artist long forgotten. A Latin inscription below, partly eroded, invokes Christ’s liberty and the hearts of Lucca. The fresco is fragile, nearly dissolved, but in its ghostly survival it speaks of Lucca’s long devotion to the Virgin. Madonna paintings were common in markets as she was seen as the protectress of commerce and civic life.
An Open-Air Chronicle
Read as a whole, Piazza San Michele contains:
- popular religion (the indulgence plaque)
- Renaissance genius (Civitali’s Madonna)
- Neo-Renaissance nationalism (Columbus and Vespucci medallions)
- patriotic sacrifice (Tito Strochi)
- scientific adventure (Carlo Piaggia)
- artistic pride (Vincenzo Consani)
- modern trauma and remembrance (Casa del Mutilato)
Together, these stones form a civic biography. They record how Lucca has imagined itself—faithful, cultured, independent, wounded, curious, and proud.
Piazza San Michele is not only the city’s geographic heart; it is its memory in marble and bronze. Anyone who stops to read the names and faces realizes that the piazza does what all great public spaces do: it remembers for us, even when we forget.
